The Developer Track was a series of 20 min technical talks on the second day of the conference. As Marshall McLuhan said “The Medium is the Message”. The message here is “We’re not going deep”. OK – at least if a presentation is not engaging, I’ll only need to sit through 20 mins of it. But for the great presentations – and there were several – it wasn’t enough time IMHO. And when there were technical difficulties (a couple of times), then you really felt how short the time was.

Here’s some of the stuff I saw / heard at the Dublin Web Summit, Developer Track.

Frank admitted that the telecoms weren’t very effective at catering for developers or supporting open ecosystems on their infrastructure. Deutsche Telekom has a project Gestalt that is re-imaging their relationship with developers – and it starts with empathy for developers: their goals, motivations, frustrations.

Be careful of letting your architects build the external API. It might not actually solve the problems that developers or other businesses care about. Or they might be too hard to use. When they design an API the focus on 3 things:

External Usecases

Internal Usecases

The technological factors (security, performance, etc)

APIs need great companions (SDKs, Demos, How-tos, Docs, Tools, Logs, etc). APIs also need evangelists to take this to the developer community.

On Doing It Wrong – Chris Poole, Founder of 4chan

“Single points of failure probably aren’t as bad as you think”. There is a tradeoff between cost and availability. 4chan runs on 5 servers, each specialized. [ED: I think he can say this because he isn’t charging anyone for access to 4chan]

“You probably don’t need an API”. They just added a read-only JSON API. But they are getting 50 Million requests per day on their API now. Half of their traffic was scrapers before the API (600 million page requests / day).

“HTML is a great cache”. They render static HTML, gzip, push to disk. Serve via Nginx. Cloudflare proxies their HTML requests. Their pages aren’t personalized so they can do this.

“No SCM for 5+ years”. They only had 1 developer at a time for years. [ED: Dear lord. This is terrible]

All the content in 4chan is ephemeral. They don’t save more than 24hrs. So nearly everything can fit into memory. There’s no DMCA worries because things are not saved on the site. Unwitting benefit to the nature of the site.

On Scaling to $1B – Renaud Visage, Co-Founder & CTO of Eventbrite

The $1B above is accumulated ticket sales. They’ll do $600M in 2012. They set out to revolutionize ticketing. Renaud covered all the key points when giving good advice on building and scaling a product.

At the Start: one eng, custom python framework, mysql, apache, one server, no designer.

Hire smarter than you. Hire generalists to start up, and then specialists to help you scale.

Add process as you scale the team.

Thoughts on growth – Josh Elman, Former lead product guy at Facebook and Twitter

Josh shared a bit about the story of Twitter. They were seeking to articulate the persona of someone who uses Twitter. They eventually came to: “Someone who want to know what’s happening in their world”.

At LinkedIn, they focused very intensely on the text of the Invite request. When they defined it as sharing opportunities, acceptance rates took off.

Key focus of the talk: The first time someone interacts with your product is the best time to educate them. Creating a long, educational first experience. He walked through their improvements to the first-time-user experience for Twitter. Very interesting.

On Launching Products – Brenden Mulligan, Founder of Onesheet and other stuff

Things he launched in a 12 month period:

Photopile – Instagram on the web?

MorningPics – Sends you your pics each morning

OneSheet – Splash Pages for Entertainment

TipList – City Guide

WebbyGram – How Instagram should look on the web (again?)

Advice on Launching:

Focus on 3-5 key metrics only!

Create a simple dashboard. Make a mobile interface to it. Make it your home screen. Send the whole team a daily report email, text based with key #s. Generate simple alerts for important things.

Target relevant press. Find writers that care about the product, with readers that care more.

Automated emails are okay if they are personal. Plain text. From name@domain.com. Make it super personal. “Hi there! I noticed….”. Start simple, just ask users what they think.

On Products and People – Taso Du Val, CEO of TopTal

I didn’t realize the theme of his topic until the end. Basically he was advocating a method for creating a business and product.

Who makes great products?

Not great engineers

Not great visionaries

Rich People with Experience [Ed: really?] Why Rich People? Time. Less Pressure. Access to People. Most products never become finished.

Model for bootstrapping a business: Start with a low-leverage almost-services business that generates revenue. Then transition into a software product based business. Consumer plays are more difficult than enterprise plays.

On Customers – Des Traynor, Co-founder and COO Of Intercom

A funny an entertaining talk about the customer perspective and when (or when not) to reach out to customers. Not many points to walk away with.

On MariaDB – Monty Widenius, Co-founder of MySQL

His goal was to get the developers to switch to MariaDB. Key points:

Oracle is slowly closing up MySQL.

Monty Program Ab is a support company for MariaDB. “Save the People, Save the Product”. Keep the MySQL talent together.

MariaDB already has a number of improvement over MySQL (performance, replication).

With regard to timing. First Firefox OS phones will ship next year. South American telecomm carriers first.

They want it so you can ‘view source’ for apps on the phone.

They want to support app discovery, but not necessarily an app-store clone. Purchases that work across devices.

She addressed the need for developers to be able to monetize their creations – but no specifics.

Final Thoughts

They didn’t leave time in the schedule for lunch! What? The schedule went from 9:00am until 3:00pm with only a 10 minute break at 11:20. This had three bad consequences:

The presenters were competing with my hunger for attention. Hmmm… I wonder how effective that is.

There was no time that could be used to re-align the schedule if presenters went over. As the day progressed the schedule drifted back.

There was no time to resolve technical issues. In this case the machine that was hosting the presentations was slowing down over the course of the day. Not sure if the presentation software was growing in memory size after some massive decks or what, but I think it would have been helpful to give that poor machine a reboot. Eventually they added a small 5 minute break to do that.

A much better schedule would have involved two 15 min breaks and 30-60 min lunch.

And finally, it’s easy to criticize. But Eamon Leonard and the organizers deserve praise for putting together a day with lots of interesting content. I’m glad I came, and hope to be able to be here again next year.